Gaming

Other

2015-12-01: podlators 4.01

The previous release, switching to Module::Build, created a circular
dependency with Module::Build itself with older versions of Perl. I
pondered various ways to get around this, since I'm no longer a fan of
ExtUtils::MakeMaker, but I finally decided that I was being silly. So
podlators now just uses ExtUtils::MakeMaker — it does support the new
metadata keys these days — rather than trying to support two separate
build systems. (ExtUtils::MakeMaker is required for Perl core
integration.)

This release also didn't fix the problems with Term::Cap 1.16 in
particular (although it worked with 1.17). That's also now fixed in this
release by ensuring that Pod::Text::Termcap doesn't override an existing
TERMPATH environment variable setting, something it shouldn't have been
doing in the first place.

2015-12-02: podlators 4.02

Another day, another podlators release. This time, a slightly misguided
cleanup I did on the build system broke useful installation for versions
of Perl prior to 5.11. (The module would be installed, but in a directory
shadowed by the Perl core library, so to no real effect.)

Thanks very much to Peter Rabbitson for all the help in sorting out these
build issues. Now I have better comments about all the interesting traps
for dual-life modules.

2015-12-05: git-pbuilder 1.38

A minor update to the builder glue script for git-buildpackage. This
release just has documentation fixes. I had missed that you no longer
need explicit gbp.conf configuration because git-buildpackage now has a
--git-pbuilder flag, and, when using that, there are a variety of
other command-line flags to use instead of environment variables.

2015-12-06: podlators 4.03

There was a bug in the test suite of the last few versions of podlators
that caused the test for devising dates to fail if POD_MAN_DATE or
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH were already set. Since I needed to fix that anyway, I
decided to poke at the test suite some more, and made some good progress
towards refactoring it, breaking out common code, and making it easier to
add new tests. It's still in the stage where I've added more code than
I've removed, but a lot of that is comments and the new code is much
better.

It was tempting to keep going until I'd refactored the whole test suite,
but that's how I go too long between releases, so here, have another small
release. The only changes are in the test suite, not in the code.

2015-12-06: Term::ANSIColor 4.04

The recent work I've been doing on podlators taught me that the build
system of my other core module, Term::ANSIColor, was also doing the wrong
thing when installed on Perl versions older than 5.11, even though no one
had reported it. While I was there, I also switched back to
ExtUtils::MakeMaker for the build system so that I'm testing the same
build system that's also used for Perl core.

Since it had been more than a year since the last release, I also made
some minor cleanup of new perlcritic warnings and fixed a place where
coverage analysis was misanalyzing a bit of code. There are no
significant code changes.

2015-12-06: git-pbuilder 1.39

This update isn't anything particularly exciting, just some more
documentation improvements (gbp buildpackage is now the standard
invocation instead of git-buildpackage), so instead you get some
explanation of this flurry of little software releases.

Since the huge transition a year and a half ago, I've been doing lots of
adjustment to a different employer, a different commute, a different
schedule, different types of work (which has changed several times),
different management chains (which have changed even more), and the
political and social environment at a new place. Oh, and then moving for
the first time in about fifteen years.

All of that has meant a lot of distraction and disruption, and that, in
turn, really torpedoed my free software work for a while. The silver
lining is that it also gave me some distance from all the things I was
working on, and an opportunity to think harder about what I want to do and
how I want to allocate time.

So, I did a bit of a prioritization exercise (although I should do a few
more), thought about what I really wanted to focus on, and have been
putting some more effort into making time for free software work,
community things, and similar work that I'd been letting slip. I'm also
doing less of a few things, particularly trying to stay up on random email
(so expect me to not be as good of a correspondant), just because there
aren't enough hours in the day.

Anyway, hence the flurry. Not making any committments, as committment
stress is something else I'm getting away from, but it was a fun and
productive weekend.

You can get the latest version of git-pbuilder from my
script distribution page. (Still want to
rewrite this in Python at some point.)

2015-12-25: kstart 4.2

kstart is a collection of two utilities for managing Kerberos tickets,
particularly focused on the needs of long-running commands or daemons.

This release has taken embarassingly long to release, given that the last
release was in January of 2012. Sorry about that, particularly those who
were stuck on various bugs! This code base, particularly the test suite,
is in dire need of significant refactoring, which reduces my desire to
work on it, and then I ran very, very short on free software time.

This release is important because I think I've finally worked through all
the various tricky complexity of startup when running a command under
k5start.

The core problem: the original k5start exited when authentication failed.
However, it's very nice to start daemons that need a Kerberos ticket by
running them via k5start. But if this is done during system startup, the
network may not be up yet, and one may not be able to contact the KDC.
It's very difficult to get the timing right just by adjusting init
scripts.

The core fix in this release is that k5start run as a daemon or with a
command, and krenew run with the -i option, now keeps retrying the
authentication or renewal until it succeeds. It's retried immediately and
then with exponential backoff, starting with a delay of a second, until
intervals of one minute, and then retried at a delay of one minute until
it succeeds. Any command isn't run until the authentication works, so
(unlike previous versions) k5start won't start the command without a
Kerberos ticket. That should fix various problems people are having.

There are also some new options to tweak the renewal behavior. -H
can now be used in combination with -K to specify how long of a
minimum ticket lifetime k5start or krenew should try to maintain.
Alternately, there's now a -a flag that tells both to attempt an
authentication or renewal every time they wake up (at the interval
specified with -K). This probably should have been the default for
-K originally, but I didn't change the original behavior for
backwards compatibility.

There are also a couple of bug fixes: the temporary ticket cache created
by k5start is cleaned up properly, and the programs no longer incorrectly
reject the combination of -b and -K or a command.